


Light At the End of the Tunnel

by ivywatcher



Series: Goodbye Sunnydale (Goodbye Home) [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jossverse
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, One Shot, Post Season 7, no one is surprised by either of those tags at this point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-06
Updated: 2011-12-06
Packaged: 2017-10-27 00:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivywatcher/pseuds/ivywatcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was after they did what they always said they’d do. After high school, after college, after watching friends die and come back and die again, after Sunnydale finally, finally was no more, that the darkness fell at last. In some ways Xander was surprised that it had taken so long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light At the End of the Tunnel

It was after they did what they always said they’d do. After high school, after college, after watching friends die and come back and die again, after Sunnydale finally,  _finally_  was no more, that the darkness fell at last. In some ways Xander was surprised that it had taken so long for night to close in around them and cast its inky shroud around their movements. But the rest of him, the parts that were still cracked and shattered and dissolved after the last seven years, saw the twilight coming and embraced it with open arms. The Xander that he’d been seven years ago--back when he saw the world in black and white with two eyes and a quiet confidence that good would always win--that Xander would have put up more of a fight, probably. But not this one. This Xander understood something his younger self could not (or maybe refused) to grasp.

They’d been fooling themselves.

There was no light at the end of the tunnel. That’s what they’d been fighting for all this time. And he realized now that they’d all given up on it long before this.

Buffy had given up the puppy dogs and rainbows when she’d been torn away from them. She’d gotten to the end of the tunnel, but her friends' misplaced love had cast her out of heaven. Xander wasn't sure if that alone made the rest of it (the rest of _them)_ hell to her, or whether she'd helped it along by getting it on with her own darkness fetish. They’d all found out the hard way that the tunnel kept pulling you back. Maybe someday Buffy would find the light again. Maybe she already had, in bits and pieces. Maybe she'd stopped trying. He didn't want to ask.

Willow’s disillusionment wasn’t quite so fast, but in some ways that made it worse. It started when she wiped Tara’s memory of a simple fight. No, that was lie. It had started before then, but Xander still couldn't associate the six-year-old who'd slipped under his covers with the black-veined crazy who'd nearly killed them all without choking up. But after Tara it was worse. The tunnel seemed to get too dark and twisted and for a long, long time all Willow could see was Tara’s blood and the sound of Warren's skin coming off. Sometimes Xander wondered if Willow even believed that there was a light for her. Even for all her zen one-with-the-earth stuff, she never talked about it. What made it worse was that he couldn’t tell her that there was.

Giles…Xander didn’t know if Giles had ever really believed in a happy ending. He’d almost had one once, with Ms. Calendar. Maybe he’d had a chance before that. (None of them had ever asked. It felt too much like guilt.) But he had always been too jaded, too weary of the world to really believe in all that happily ever after crap. Giles had been their rock. Now he was eroding, and they'd barely noticed, and that was probably the scariest thing of all. Apocalypse had beaten Giles once in the form of Buffy's silent swan dive, and apparently after that it was easier to let the smaller evils go, let them in. 

When had it gotten so bad? When had it gotten long and hard and painful enough that even Rupert Giles got tired of it, that the Slayer didn't call herself a hero, that the best person Xander had ever met couldn't look her own reflection in the eye?

 

Maybe they'd given up too soon, too much, burnt themselves out before their time. 

Or maybe it was because the fading twilight was inevitable. Night came for them all, or some fatalistic crap like that, and it was finally just time to say goodnight.

Xander hoped it was the second one. Because his fight had died with Anya, and he was pretty sure that he’d left his pot of gold standing with her at the alter when he ran. The light he’d carried for himself, for  _them_  for so long had died and been distributed to rekindle in others more worthy of the task of bearing it. Dawn and Andrew, the potentials-turned-Slayers around the world. Even Faith, as screwed up as that was in the universal karmic scene.

He was almost envious; sitting in the dark as he looked at the light these loved ones still possessed. He vaguely remembered being that full of purpose, but the pictures were distorted, like he was looking at a blurred image through dirty glass. He remembered a time when Willow still laughed without that guilty look in her eyes and Buffy still cared about them and Giles still knew exactly the right thing to do.

Xander remembered a time when his younger self could see the world with two eyes and call it good and worth fighting for.

Maybe someday, it would hurt to look out on that world and wonder why he wasn’t living in it any more.

Someday. Just not today.

**Author's Note:**

> Character study angst one-shot? Me? Shocking.
> 
> Seriously though, thank you for your reading time. If you'd like more of this type of thing, go check out my other Buffy pieces as they get re-posted here. How did you like this one? Your comments, critiques and criticisms are all welcomed with open arms.


End file.
